Daryl Bem, the Psychologist who ‘Proved’ ESP Exists

By Christopher Shea

Portrait of Franz Anton Mesmer, who discovered ”animal magnetism” or mesmerism, a form of ESP. By W. Pallissot.

So here’s a profile I’ve been waiting for — of Daryl Bem, the Cornell psychologist who published an article, in 2010, purporting to demonstrate the validity of some forms of psychic foresight.

It turns out that Bem was a mentalist in high school, fully aware that his craft relied on making the audience think that his deductions about them, “based on tangible clues,” were the result of magic. Later, as a professor at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and then Cornell, he used to perform a version of the act on the last day of the course:

“It was a pure swindle,” Bem says … At the end of the show, he always revealed the truth. The experiment had nothing to do with ESP; the point was to demonstrate that the students shouldn’t always trust their intuition.

One day a University of Pittsburgh researcher who was studying psi—an umbrella term for telepathy, precognition, and other seemingly paranormal phenomena—came to see Bem perform. Amused as he was by the show, he thought Bem was being unfair to psi. “He said, ‘Daryl, I don’t think you know the psi literature,’!” Bem recalls. “So he sent me a bunch of stuff to read.” Bem was skeptical but fascinated.*

And so began a research project that led to the publication of a paper that some think demonstrates that weakness of some of the statistical methods that psychologists rely upon to verify your work. In short, If you can use statistics to demonstrate that people are able to predict the future (Bem explored “pre-cognition”), there must be something wrong with your statistics. (Bem sees things differently, of course. When he first analyzed his data, he tells the Discovery reporter, “I thought, my god, that is fascinating … because it means that our classical view of the physical world is wrong.”)

Bem started out as a physics graduate student, at M.I.T., taking psychology courses on the side.

*Fixed a formatting error that made it appear as if I’d written that paragraph.